single recurring profile vs invoice

[Anil Jangity]

Out of curiosity, is there a real difference if I create a recurring profile (recurring.create) with occurrences of 1 (and date of today) vs a standard invoice (invoice.create)?

Thanks,
Anil

[Fresh Marcos]

Hey Anil,

A recurring profile is not the same thing of an invoice, it is more like an "invoice template" (making that up myself) able to automatically generating invoices based on preconfigured information, this is not the same as an invoice and you would use them differently depending on your workflow.

When you have a recurring profile occurrences set to one, only one invoice will be generated based on that recurring profile, but this is still different from creating an invoice through invoice.create, for example with invoice.create you will get one invoice as a result, with recurring.create you will get two objects: recurring profile and one invoice (depending on the settings for the recurring), you can then at any time go update your recurring profile (recurring.update) and change things like the number of occurrences and it will automatically generate other invoices based on the updated recurring profile - if you compare that with invoice.update you understand that you will be updating the invoice created not the profile that will generate new invoices. 

Recurring profiles also gives you the ability to set the date the invoice will be created into the future, (invoice.create will have this date set to the date you create it), it also gives you the option of prorating the first invoice (with invoice.create you would have to do it manually); it also gives you the ability of including auto-billing info so the invoice(s) generated gets automatically payed (with invoice.create the client of the invoice would have to act to pay it), there are more options, but I hope this help you start to understand the difference between using recurring.create and invoice.create. As I said before all depends on the workflow that better suits your case.

Take care,

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Fresh Marcos